Social media is a low-cost effective technique to promote your products or services to your target audience organically, as well as through social advertising. Social media is the here and now and consumers expect you to be on top of your game.
However, if you’re not an expert, it can seem like a different language. Regardless of your industry, here are the 5 areas you should focus on for the remainder of the year in order to boost your engagement and following.
Implement incentives
Every piece of content you create should add value to your audience so they have an incentive to follow you. Too much promotional content is off putting, won’t encourage people to follow and may even cause people to unfollow. For this reason, you need a balance between products, tips, quotes, topical information and similar content, as long as it’s relevant to your industry.
Review your existing content and determine whether this area can be improved when it comes to incentives. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and ask yourself, why would you want to follow this page? Does each piece of content add value?
Generating shareable content
With the new Instagram algorithm, shares are more important than ever. The number of shares is prioritised by the algorithm, now becoming the leading feature to determine just how high your reach gets. This means if you don’t have many shares, your content will not even appear on the feeds of many of the people that follow you.
When it comes to Facebook, the more shares, the more followers come in naturally. Not only this but it will increase the number of likes on the post and you have the ability to to invite post likers to like the page.
This point leads on from the previous incentive point - content that adds value and is relevant to your following will automatically become shareable. Audience members will instinctively feel the need to share, which increases your reach and the recurrent following and engagement.
Always have this in mind when you’re creating the content plan - while you do need some posts promoting your brand, also create informative content that encourages people to share.
Facebook advertising
Now that you have created valuable content, you have the ability to either boost the post or generate it as an ad on Ads Manager (otherwise named Business Manager). The benefits of Facebook advertising are that the content is already created and targeted to your audience, and you have the ability to promote it at a low cost to look alike audiences through location, age, gender, interests.
For even just $100, you can reach significantly more people. You have the choice of lead generation, brand awareness, engagement campaigns and more. We recommend to prioritise implementing advertising especially leading up to sale seasons such as Boxing Day and Christmas, as it creates an incentive to click on your page or site.
Facebook advertising introduces your business to an entirely new audience who can become long-standing consumers.
Build relationships
Social media has always been the ideal space to build and maintain relationships with your audience. However, sometimes engaging with consumers can fall on the backburner and instead, focus on promotions and additional content can easily happen when business gets busy.
The mid-year point is a perfect time to analyse your interaction with consumers on social media and determine whether you are generating content that speaks directly to your target audience. The content should make people feel as though they are included in the conversation and generate a level of connection to your brand.
When looking into your content, ask yourself - is there personality in your social content? Do you ask questions within the text? Do you use conversational language and create topical content?
Refine a social content plan
Once you have analyzed your existing content, you should be able to refine a content plan for the remainder of 2021. Ensure you fill the gaps that you were missing when you undertook your review of initial content.
Within your content plan, incorporate posts that align with your sales plans. For instance, if you offer Boxing Day sales, ensure there are around three posts leading up to this day. To ensure more specific and time-sensitive content, it’s recommended to create each content calendar one month in advance and cover the entirety of the next month. In this manner, you can fully optimize your content to speak on topical events.
Remind yourself of the three key focuses while creating the content plan - create incentives to follow, build relationships and generate shareable content. With these tips in hand, you should see engagement increase!
Olivia Fairhurst is a business owner of Loving Local NZ and freelance Content Manager for a range of clients, including The Uniform Centre. Olivia also has experience as a journalist at the New Zealand Herald and at multiple PR agencies. With this experience, Olivia has more than 5 years managing social media and building followings for clients so they can use social media as a tool to promote their business. Social media is a low-cost effective technique to generate more leads and build relationships with audiences. For this reason, Olivia can’t rave enough about the benefits of social media for businesses. You can find Olivia on her Instagram here.
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